Celtic Connections review: Bruce MacGregor & Friends, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

There were were stomping strathspeys and quicksilver reels aplenty from Bruce MacGregor and pals, but some of the most memorable moments were gentler in pace, writes Jim Gilchrist

Bruce MacGregor PIC: Archie MacFarlane

Bruce MacGregor & Friends, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall ****

The title of Highland fiddler and broadcaster Bruce MacGregor’s new album, The Road to Tyranny, may suggest we’re all en route to hell in the proverbial handcart. Its launch concert, however, proved a good humoured and musically zestful celebration of more than two decades of the man’s playing and composing.

He was in excellent company, with the album’s co-producers Angus Lyon on keyboard and fiddler-guitarist Anna Massie, as well as peerless string harmonies from fiddler Jenna Reid and cellist Su-a Lee: salient contributions, too, from bassist Duncan Lyall, percussionist Iain Sandilands, guitarist-accordionist Tim Edey and Ali Levack on whistles.

The music never flagged and while there were stomping strathspeys and quicksilver reels aplenty, some of the most memorable moments were gentler in pace. MacGregor opened with a stately salute to his birthplace, Essich, outside Inverness, its hill now crowned by an electricity sub-station, as he informed us wryly, but a fond remembrance nevertheless.

There was poignancy, too, in Linda’s Waltz, MacGregor’s fiddle singing plaintively alongside cello, and further rich string harmonising in his Lament for Captain Simon Fraser – a warm-toned memorial to a troubled tune collector.

Levack’s whistle and Edey’s melodeon helped vivify the wonderfully titled hornpipe Dave Gifford’s Adventure Wrapped in a Dream, and there were Cajun frolics, enlisting Sandilands’ washboard and the background swell of Iain Sloan’s lap steel guitar, in The Big Yin’s, recalling a memorable visit to Billy Connolly’s home.

An encore reprised the celebrated Doddie’s Dream, with which MacGregor raised thousands in aid of the motor neurone disease research foundation established by the afflicted rugby hero Doddie Weir. It was bolstered by wordless vocals from Hannah Rarity and a degree of mask-muffled chorusing from an audience who were, however, ecstatic in their appreciation of a far from tyrannical evening.

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